If you want to have maximum compression / zero filling, you should dothat as root in your shutdown script, for all your partitions justbefore unmounting them (in /etc/init.d/umountfs).

> The "wipe" program and package may be of interest as well. To be used
> instead of rm above.

That would be more if you wanted to sanitize completely all the datathat was referenced by deleted files from the hard disk. In whichcase it will be faster to use wipe on the individual sensititive
files.

BTW, fileutils (now coreutils) comes with shred, which is more or lesslike wipe. One less package installed.

Billy was asking about compressing the virtual hard disk data, andwipe/shred's sixteen passes of overwriting are way overkill :)